The idea of social grief, that we are or could be united by loss, was an important part of the makeup of the 20th century. Yesterday in the Hatfield Historical Museum we inventoried the flags and banners from our textile collection. There are many, but the one that stopped me was this one: the World War I Service flag for Homer Bardwell and Curtis Bardwell (below).

These flags were used to signify the homes of people in the military. A blue star was for a person serving, a gold star was for a person who had died in service, a gold cross for a person injured in service. Some homes had one star, others had several. All of them helped those passing by to understand that this family was thinking of someone far away, possibly in harm’s way. This helped form a community and support for families if anything in the news was cause for alarm. If a family had a blue star and then it was replaced with a gold star, everyone knew what had happened. Everyone could be extra considerate and compassionate with the grieving family.

19th century mourning wear

Also recently in the museum, we inventoried all of the hats, including an entire box of black mourning wear. Black hats, black bonnets with long black veils, black ribbon collars, dull black bands and black net shawls. There was a whole system of mourning wear, from deepest black through dark purple to lavender to gray and white. Colors would return as you felt able or after commonly accepted lengths of time. Whole industries grew up around this, with whole methods of fabric production. Mourning wear served the same purpose for grieving individuals that blue star and gold star flags served for families. Beyond the message to people passing by the house, this mourning wear alerted everyone you interacted with throughout your day that you were in grief, and to perhaps be understanding if you took a little more time to do a simple task, or suddenly teared up for no clear reason.

Ruth Withun Lord, died 2007

I miss this. A dozen years ago, my family went through a long hard period of loss. In 18 months, I lost three grandparents (including my grandmother at left), my father-in-law, and two brothers-in-law. I remember standing at the counter at the gas station, trying to complete the exchange, and wishing so very much that I could be wearing a black mourning band or veil so that people would know, without me having to tell them, that I was bearing up under the pain of loss, and they might be more patient with me. I wanted to see other people around town wearing black or sober clothes, to have some sense of not being alone in the depths of my grief. Even if I did not know them, to have seen other people walking around with clear signifiers of loss and grief would have been a tremendous comfort.

We want comforting when we are grieving, and we want to know we are not alone when we are feeling so bereft. During many of our nation’s wars, the names of the injured and dead were published in the local papers, and buildings and people were visibly marked by loss. We have in our collective memory black-draped hearses and Jackie Kennedy in a black hat and sheer black veil, flag-draped coffins and candle-light vigils. Maybe sometime we will again have a way for people to convey their personal grief with the same simple wordless dignity that a WWI Service flag or a black armband gave to those in decades past. For now, let us remember that no matter what people are wearing, some of those we see each day are suffering great loss and none of us are or need to be alone in our sorrow.

Author

Meguey Baker studied early American textile history and material culture at Hampshire College. She is a member of the Mohawk Trail Quilt Guild, on the board of the Historical Society of Greenfield, and does textile repair and conservation for private clients.

There is always something special about children’s toys that have survived down through time. Not only do they speak to well-loved playthings and the sentimentality of the little owner and the family that preserved them, but there is much to be learned from the articles themselves. This doll’s dress holds a wealth of information, even in its worn state.

Click for larger image

This is a very practical doll’s dress circa 1860. It was used, taken on and off, possibly washed by the little child to whom it belonged. The threadbare fabric and the worn red edging suggest this was a teaching toy such as little girls and boys have always loved and used to practice sewing, dressing, laundering, and other parenting and housekeeping skills. There are certainly examples of dolls and doll clothes from this era that are pristine, unused and definitely “not for children" -- this is the opposite, which makes its preservation more remarkable.

The first thing that is noteworthy in seeing this dress is the fabric. The shade is dramatic and the style is expressive of the day, and we can use the two to make an educated estimate of when the dress was made. An innovation in dye technology created a colorfast purple or mauve dye in 1859; before that time, purples were often unfixed -- or fugitive -- and faded out nearly completely by our current day, especially for something as well used as this dress. So, we know this was made post-1859. The style of the dress also provides dating details. The sleeves are fully lined with tan cotton muslin, just as the child’s sleeves may well have been. The bodice, waistband, and very full skirt all mirror mid-1800s fashions.

Here is where we begin to get clues as to the seamstress: the red wool tape neckband and trim. If this were a grown woman making beautiful doll clothes for her child, we might expect a bit of black ribbon, perhaps a scrap of simple lace. That red wool is whimsical and indifferent to social ideas of what colors go with what prints. Between that and examining the seams, I feel very comfortable saying that this dress was made by a child, or at least by a less experienced seamstress. The hand stitching is serviceable but not fine or well-practiced, and we have in company with this dress crisp white over skirts that show a finer quality of work. To me, this reads absolutely as scraps of a fancy new purple cloth handed over to a child so she might make a dress for her doll.

There is even a nice blend of skills, as the construction seams are hand sewn (see photos above) and the hem is sewn by machine -- sewing machines being a recent arrival in the home following Elias Howe’s 1846 invention in nearby Cambridge, MA. By 1860, this technology was available to the home seamstress, but it was still a very new thing, not in every home, and certainly used under supervision. This explains the machine stitching on the hem, where there are few consequences if the seam goes a little astray.

Pocket! (click for larger image)

The last and perhaps most charming feature of this dress is the transitional pocket. Pockets are no longer always a separate item of clothing in the 1860s, tied around the waist beneath the dress, alongside the hoop skirts and petticoats. The seamstress gave her dolly a pocket set into the side seam. This is a complex process for a child, requiring multiple steps and a three-dimensional understanding of the fabric. It is also a beautiful practicality, that she wanted her doll to have a modern pocket, and she was imagining what her doll might carry with her.

Nonetheless, it would be easy to overlook, and it is a reminder to all who are interested in dating or learning more about objects to look inside and under and behind as well as straight on.

From a child’s plaything, we can not only make informed decisions about the date and techniques of creation, but also peek into the past domestic scene in which it was made. Such a lot of information packed into such an ordinary thing!

Meguey Baker studied early American textile history and material culture at Hampshire College. She is a member of the Mohawk Trail Quilt Guild, a volunteer textile conservation specialist at Memorial Hall in Deerfield, and does textile repair and conservation for private clients.

The following guest post is written by Meguey Baker, our new Collections Assistant working on the Collections Management & Preservation Project for the Hatfield Historical Museum. This is our multi-year project to inventory and rehouse our collection in archival settings, funded by Hatfield's Community Preservation Act. Meg comes to us from Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, where she's done work over the last five years in historic textile preservation and conservation. She replaces prior Collections Assistant Hannah Zahn, responsible for transcribing our hand-written accessions register #2 so we can now search it electronically (thanks, Hannah!). Please welcome Meg and check out her post about how to search for something online when you don't know what it is.

Click image for larger view

By Meguey Baker

One of the most delightful things about material culture and conservation work is the process of discovery. Every artifact is interesting for various reasons, and I love when I encounter something entirely new. I have seen a lot of different examples of decorative arts, but on my first day as the collections assistant at the Hatfield Historical Museum, I saw something I had never seen before. Curator Kathie Gow handed me a box of items to write up accession sheets for. There were a few fans, a needlepoint piece, and what appeared to be a booklet of faded construction paper, fastened with a bow on one side.

What is it?

As soon as I opened the cover, however, I knew it was something special (click on image at left). The delicate pressed ferns and flowers were still crisp and bright, the fringed edge was shining golden, and the netting ground was fully intact. The whole thing sang "Victorian fancy work!" clear as a bell. When I went home that afternoon, I couldn't stop thinking about the wreaths and the golden fringe and the not-quite-geometric netting that supported the pressed plants. Thankfully, we now have modern technology as well as old books of fancy work ideas and directions. To the internet I went. My first search was for “Victorian pressed flowers.” My goodness there are a lot of folks making things in the Victorian style these days. Next search: “vintage Victorian pressed ferns” That brought me to Etsy, a marketplace for new and vintage crafts, where there was a very similar construction paper doily. This artifact looked so much like the one I'd seen earlier in the day I felt it must be the same technique, particularly in the close-up of the not-quite-geometric netting. How exciting! And a new lead, with new search terms -- the caption mentions Jamaica, the U.K., and fundraising in the 1870s. My next search, “1870 pressed ferns Jamaica,” took me to the last step on this discovery quest: A PDF of a paper on Jamaican lace-bark, which has an inner bark that can be stretched and expanded to make a sturdy, flexible natural netting. The article even shows a picture of a wreath like ours and identifies the golden outer fringe as the seed hairs of French cotton, Calotropis procera – which is basically a giant milkweed. The link is absolutely clear, and there remains no doubt in my mind that what we have in Hatfield is an authentic 1870s Jamaican fern doily. This allows us to include a date on the record for this piece, and to understand more about how it may have wound up in Hatfield – these artifacts were made and sold either as souvenirs or as fundraising items to support mission work in Jamaica.

In writing this up and recreating my searches, I came across a few other interesting sites with more information on these beautiful handcrafts:

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Curator's musings...

As the curator of a small town Historical Society museum, I wonder a great many things. Am I alone in these thoughts that come to me while driving, or exercising, or falling asleep at night? Is it unusual to be constructing displays and writing copy in one's head for an enlarged museum space that does not, as yet, exist?

If you're wondering about the blog title, "Bird by bird," see my First Post for an explanation! Click HERE to read it.

When I'm not thinking about our museum or rehousing artifacts with my fellow museum committee members, I'm helping out with the Pioneer Valley History Network (of which I'm a board member), collecting or editing digital oral histories (see words.pictures.stories)or keeping track of my two teenage kids.